Download - Российский комитет Программы ЮНЕСКО ...

SECTION 1. INSTRUMENTS FOR LANGUAGE
PRESERVATION AND PROMOTION IN CYBERSPACE
Marcel DIKI-KIDIRI
Senior Researcher, French National Centre for Scientific Research
(Poitiers, France)
Creating Content for Less-Diffused Languages
on a Web Site
A web site is a prominent and very important tool for promoting any given
language in cyberspace. Therefore, it is worth using it to support less-diffused
languages. Let us start with a brief recall of what is a web site.
1. Different Kinds of Web Sites
Basically a web site is a page of a document written in HTML or XML language
in order to be published on the Web. This page may include different elements
such as texts, pictures, movies and sounds. In the early age of the Web, only
the webmaster could modify his website by adding to it or withdrawing from
it any element of information. Interaction with the visitors of the site was
limited to specific devices such as a guestbook, a forum or newsgroup. Since
then, the Web technology has undergone a very deep evolution leading to what
is known as “web 2.0”, a thoroughly interactive kind of web site that allows a
fast development of social networks.
In this new model of web sites, every visitor may sign up and then is given a
personal page with her/his profile. Users can access a large set of tools to act
like a webmaster, post any document they want, and interact with an endless
number of people individually, selectively or collectively. So, it becomes
possible to organize all kinds of collaborative activities directly on the web site
in real time. Now, the most important question is not “how to do” but “what
to do” Indeed, the structure of your web site depends on what you want to do
with it! That is where the content issue comes in.
2. Different Kinds of Content
There is no limitation to the diversity of the content that can be included in a web
site. Yet, as we are interested in web sites designed to support any less-diffused
language, let us draw the outlines of some of the content which may be expected on
this kind of web sites. On such a site information should be found on the language
123